Microsoft battles Google for .gov contracts with Office 365 for Government

Segregated cloud storage will tick regulatory checkboxes.

Microsoft has announced Office 365 for Government, a new version of its Office 365 cloud productivity services with a special, government-focused twist: they use segregated government-only storage to ameliorate worries about privacy and security.

In addition to the special storage, the service complies with a laundry list of national and international standards on data security and privacy: ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, EU Safe Harbor, EU Model Clauses, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and the US Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). The company is working on supporting Criminal Justice Information Security (CJIS) policies, and later in the year plans to introduce support for IPv6.

Aside from the government-only cloud, Office 365 for Governments is equivalent to the regular product, with Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office Web Apps in the cloud, and the option of having the desktop version of the Office 2010 suite too.

Microsoft and Google have been competing vigorously to sign up government institutions for their cloud services. Both have scored wins, with Google taking Los Angeles, but Microsoft winning contracts in New York City and San Francisco. The competition has been intense, with Google suing the US government alleging that it was unfairly denied a bid for an e-mail contract for the Department of the Interior. Google prevailed in court and eventually won the contract with its own Google Apps for Government product.

I believe the Los Angeles win for Google isn't a complete victory. They wound up being dropped by the police department for a bunch of mostly security concerns. Admittedly dealing with LAPD on projects is one of the most frustrating jobs in life, but that is a big loss for Google.

I believe the Los Angeles win for Google isn't a complete victory. They wound up being dropped by the police department for a bunch of mostly security concerns. Admittedly dealing with LAPD on projects is one of the most frustrating jobs in life, but that is a big loss for Google.

I believe the Los Angeles win for Google isn't a complete victory. They wound up being dropped by the police department for a bunch of mostly security concerns. Admittedly dealing with LAPD on projects is one of the most frustrating jobs in life, but that is a big loss for Google.

Last I read they gave up due to not being able to meet FBI requirements and had to give up. They lost big time as they are compensating them to keep their groupwise server up.

Microsoft has a poor history of CRM compliance with their SharePoint. I wonder if Google can do any better. If both have to resort to 3rd party solutions, then neither should be allowed to win this bid.

Both companies are new to cloud services like this and have different problems, but they are actually pretty evenly matched I think. Google has slightly more experience, Microsoft has brand recognition. Working for government I can attest that while there is increasing pressure to move away from Microsoft products; as they have offered less than stellar support, burned a lot of bridges with exclusivity deals and gotcha clauses that have a history of getting very expensive when you try and scale them; and look embarrassingly bad in situations where organizations had to be transparent and stable - Google still doesn't feel as familiar or comfortable as Microsoft does, so it makes it a hard sell. They also don't have as many people in their pocket, and government is loathe to change. So the fight for Google is always uphill, even with the more stable and cost effective product.

I guess Google Docs is good enough for private use but, lately, it's been TERRIBLE to use. I have to attempt 3x to put a label on a doc and, often, I get a timeout error when trying to download a doc behind a fiber ISP. Hopefully it's just because they're integrating the Google Drive.

Well Office 356 is the superior product in terms of enterprise. Google is fine for education and personal service, but I don't really want them data mining government files.

Actually, no, it's the inferior late to the game product that still has issues on browsers other than IE. As for data mining -you really have no idea what you're talking about as that's a pretty ignorant statement.

Microsoft has a poor history of CRM compliance with their SharePoint. I wonder if Google can do any better. If both have to resort to 3rd party solutions, then neither should be allowed to win this bid.

MS SharePoint sucks! I have to deal with this not-website-software-pretending-to-be-website-software almost daily. It's a horrible mess of permission and feature set restrictions. The "just think of everything as a spreadsheet" mentality is NOT how a website should be created or maintained. It has an all-or-nothing way of dealing with formatting text cells which drives me crazy!